Hard Rain

“Here you go.” Lurie set plates before them. Jesse’s “usual’’ was a king-size cheeseburger, a side of onion rings and a double chocolate shake. Lurie slipped a bottle of Tabasco sauce out of her apron pocket, put it beside his plate. Amy stopped smiling. She’d known only one other person in her lifetime who put hot sauce on his hamburger. She watched him unscrew the top, lift up the bun and splash the sauce on his burger. He replaced the bun, brought the burger to his mouth and took a big bite. He glanced at her untouched plate. “Something wrong?” he asked, chewing.

“The hot sauce on your hamburger…” She didn’t know what she was trying to say.

“Heavenly.” He took another big bite. “Obviously one of those true Texan habits that hasn’t hit the West Coast yet.” He tipped his head. Amy looked around. At every station, a similar bottle of hot sauce stood beside the catsup bottle. “Of course, when it does, you Californians will claim you all started the trend and take the credit.”

Amy smiled wanly, feeling foolish. She looked down at her food, but her appetite was gone.

“So, you’re married?” she asked bluntly.

He seemed to have trouble swallowing. “No, I’m not. Your image of a true Texas sheriff may remain intact.” He picked up an onion ring. “And I, darlin’, am free to flirt with whomever I want.”

Jesse didn’t ask if she were married. He didn’t have to. Still, sitting beside her, he wondered if she’d ever dreamed the things he had in the years they’d been apart. Had she dreamed of them holding each other, kissing in the soft moonlight? Dreamed of their naked bodies…?

He leaned back, wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his empty plate. “Excuse me.” He rose from the counter and headed to the rest room.

Amy watched him, too many questions still forming in her mind. Lurie came over and picked up Jesse’s plate. Amy turned to her, pushed her own plate toward the edge of the counter. Lurie looked at the half-eaten sandwich as she stacked the plate atop the other. “Was everything okay?”

“Oh, yes, fine,” Amy assured her. “I’m just not terribly hungry.”

Lurie cocked a hip, balancing both plates in one hand as she gathered used napkins and Amy’s empty glass in the other. “I’ve been trying to get the sheriff to smile like that for two years.”

Amy looked at her, interested.

“Hell’s bells, half the single women in the county have been trying to get their claws into the good sheriff.”

“He doesn’t date?”

“Oh, he dates all right. Probably been through most of the single women in a twenty-mile radius and then some.”

“He’s charming…” Amy noted.

Lurie crossed her arms across her arresting bosom and gave a slow nod of agreement.

“But he doesn’t strike me as the playboy type,” Amy concluded.

Lurie leaned on the counter, settling in. “That’s exactly the problem, Doc. He’s a real gentleman and a wonderful date, but if things start heating up, getting too serious, he slows it down or calls it quits altogether. He refuses to go to the next level.”

“You and he…?”

Lurie nodded. “We dated. And he was upfront about what to expect from the first. He didn’t lead me on. He’ll let you know he enjoys your company and treats you right, but if a woman is looking for the cozy cottage and the rest of the enchilada, she’s got the wrong man. Of course, like most woman, I thought I could change him.” She paused, studied her fingertips with their crescent moons. “I didn’t.” She met Amy’s gaze.

“A lot of men are afraid of commitment, settling down, Lurie.”

Lurie shook her head. “It’s different with Jesse. I can’t explain. It’s like he lives with a ghost. When we were dating, he’d look at me, but I sensed he was looking at someone else. Or for someone else. And no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find her.”

The waitress straightened. “At least, not yet.” She gave Amy a wink, swiveled and sauntered into the kitchen, her hips swaying beneath her tight black skirt.

Jesse returned. He stood beside her stool. “Lurie giving you some good gossip?” He threw several bills down on the counter.

“Just girl talk,” Amy answered as she slid off the stool.

“She’s a good gal,” Jesse said as they moved toward the door. He nodded good-bye to the other customers. “But believe about fifty percent of what she says.”

“How do you know she didn’t say the same about you?”

“She probably said believe only ten percent of what I say.”

“Actually, she said you were a straight shooter. She’s a big fan. Like most of the single women in the county.”

Their eyes met. “Is that what she said?”

“That and some.”

He slowly shook his head, laughing under his breath.

“You don’t agree?”

He reached across her to the door, so close she could feel his warmth, sense his strength.

“You’ll have me blushing yet, darlin’,” he said in a low voice that made Amy hold her breath. She stepped away, through the door, and exhaled.

The clouds were denser and darker. The winds that had come were rougher, quicker, their hard edges hitting a person dead on. Rain broke through the sky with a furor that laid the field grass flat.

“Wait here,” Jesse told Amy beneath the shelter of the diner’s metal awning. “I’ll get the Bronco and pick you up.”

He was gone before Amy could protest. She watched him weave his way among the other vehicles in the parking lot. The drop in barometric pressure could cause joints to swell, deepen aches from past injuries. If that was the case, there was no indication in Jesse’s movements.

When the Bronco pulled up in front of the diner, Amy hurried to meet it even as Jesse jumped out the driver’s side and was rounding the vehicle to open the door for her.

True Texas-sheriff fashion, she thought as he swung open the door. She turned to thank him and found him close. She pushed back the hair the wind whipped across her face and gathered it in one hand. Her other hand clung to the side of the vehicle, steadying her while the wind and the rain and something equally elemental and powerful seemed to push her toward this man.

Jesse stepped back. He shut the door on her as she climbed inside. Her face turned to his, its questioning stare now blurred by the rivulets of rain across the window. The breath he released was a long shudder as he rounded to the driver’s door.

Inside the vehicle, the dark sky and rain pounding hard on the roof created an intimacy, closing them off from the outside world.

“Jesse?”

He felt her hand on his forearm, a thousand longings in the feel of her fingertips alone. She’d said his name too softly and with too much question. He feared to turn and look into those blue-green eyes that he had dreamt about for fourteen years, afraid that if she asked, he would not lie. He would tell her the truth and damn the consequences.

He looked down at her small hand on his arm. The ripple of a scar on his own flesh returned him to his senses. If she asked, he could say he was not the Jesse Boone she had known fourteen years ago. Nor was she the young girl he’d taken in his arms and loved with every ounce of his soul. Too many years had passed, too much time and too many changes had come between them, conspired to keep them apart.

He raised his gaze to her. She searched his face.

A dispatcher’s voice over the radio interrupted.

“Fire reported in the old fertilizer warehouse over by the railroad station. Pickup truck traveling at high speed skidded off the highway. The truck was carrying kerosene and exploded on impact. County emergency vehicles en route.”

Jesse switched on the lights, the siren and punched the gas pedal.

Disaster had begun.

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